This invention relates to safety devices. More specifically, this invention relates to a child safety harness that attaches to an existing vehicle safety belt.
The use of infant safety seats and harnesses for young children riding in automobiles and airplanes is known in the art. Seats usually consist of a hollow seat shell, are often padded, and are designed to be placed on the vehicle seat and secured to the vehicle""s existing lap and/or shoulder belt system. In addition, such seats usually include some sort of integral belt restraint system to prevent the infant from escaping from the seat, or from being thrown from the seat upon rapid deceleration or impact of the vehicle. Infant car seats of this type are adequate for smaller children; but older and larger children often find such a seat too confining and uncomfortable. For larger and/or older children, larger types of car seats are available which include a metallic tubular frame adapted to be secured to the vehicle seat by the vehicle lap and/or shoulder belt system in similar fashion to the infant car seat described above. A larger padded seat having a shell-type enclosure or housing and a child safety belt restraint is mounted to the frame. Often, active and/or bored children find such seats too restrictive and resent the idea of being forced to use a xe2x80x9cchild""s seatxe2x80x9d, resulting in disruptive behavior as a consequence while remaining too small or lightweight to properly fit into conventional, xe2x80x9cadult sizexe2x80x9d shoulder and lap belt seat restraints.
Also, car seats, whether designed for infants or older children, are bulky and difficult to store when not in use. For convenience sake, such seats can be xe2x80x9cpermanentlyxe2x80x9d mounted in the vehicle even when the children are not riding in the car.
In response to the drawbacks of conventional car seats, child restraining harnesses have been disclosed in the prior art. Such harnesses basically consist of a padded plate for attachment to the child""s back with straps, and slots in the plate for accommodating the vehicular lap and/or shoulder belt system. One disadvantage of such harnesses is that a child may slide out from under the harness either deliberately or in certain emergency situations. Such a harness structure is also unsuitable for use in aircraft, since the child may easily fall out of the harness if the plane makes unusual maneuvers under emergency conditions.
Another disadvantage of the conventional restraining harnesses is the configuration of the plate, which bends under severe impact. Once bent, the plate may injure the child during post-impact rebound or whiplash. A further disadvantage of conventional restraining vests is that the shoulder belts pull unevenly upon loading from stress. This disadvantage may cause the plate to shift during impact, providing less than optimum protection to the child.
In the instance that a child is seated on the lap of an adult travel companion in a car or an airplane, the child may be left without a safety restraint. As a result, sudden turbulence, movement rapid positional change, or impact of the aircraft or car may thrust or inertially propel the child from its position on the lap of an adult through the cabin of the aircraft or towards the windshield of the car, possibly resulting in severe injury and/or death to the child. In the case of air travel, standard emergency landing and/or pre-crash procedures adopted by many airlines for the adult travel companion require the adult to firmly grasp and hold the child upon the adult""s lap during crash or emergency landing. While such practice may prevent injury to the child during minor decelerations or turbulent conditions, it is believed that such procedure is wholly inadequate to safely restrain and hold the child during an actual crash, rapid positional change, or rapid deceleration.
It has therefore been an objective of the present invention to provide a safety harness that more evenly disperses stresses acted upon a user.
It has been a further objective of the present invention to provide a safety harness that is more comfortable to use while more evenly dispersing forces acted upon a user""s spine.
The objectives of the present invention are achieved by providing in the preferred embodiment a safety harness with a back panel to evenly disperse stress acted upon a child and adapted to securely hold a child therein to an existing vehicular seatbelt. The safety harness has a chest strap and a crotch strap which converge approximately over a user""s abdominal area and/or chest. The chest strap and crotch strap have a back panel interposed therebetween that is received across a user""s back.
The back panel has a top and a bottom strap that are spaced apart from each other and lie transverse to a pair of spaced apart body straps that converge at their respective opposing ends to form the chest strap and the crotch strap. The top and bottom straps attached to the pair of body straps form a substantially open rectangular structure which lends lateral and vertical strength to the safety harness. A pair of diagonal straps each attached to a first end of one of the top and bottom straps and a second end of the other of the top and bottom straps intersect each other approximately medially so as to lend further vertical, lateral and diagonal structural strength to the safety harness. A pair of seatbelt straps are provided proximate the crotch strap through which a seatbelt is threaded so the safety harness is secured to the vehicle""s existing seatbelt system.
In use, a person, e.g., a child, is placed within the safety harness so that the child""s head is received through an aperture defined by the chest strap and back panel. Next, the crotch strap is raised up between the child""s legs. A chest belt, having chest belt halves, provided on each of the chest strap and crotch strap, is secured and tightened across the child""s chest. A waist belt secured to the bottom strap of the back panel is secured around the child""s waist. The seatbelt is threaded through the seatbelt straps provided on the safety harness either before or after the child is secured therein.